Fraying Innocence
by The Knife In Your Side
Summary: So when I volunteered and stepped up on that platform, with the whole of my district there to watch, I had one thought in my mind: there was new blood for my knife to taste...


**REWRITTEN!**

**Hi, this is a one-shot for my favourite Hunger Games character: Clove. She's just awesome, so enjoy…**

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I was an ever so curious child, one who was constantly where she was not meant to be and always doing what should not be done. The silent and troublesome one, they said. I recall staring in awe as I witnessed my brother and cousin training – fighting with swords, slashing, stabbing and diving at each other skilfully. It was beautiful and awful and inspiring.

My father kneeled down next to my six year old self, watching them also.

"Can I do that?" I asked him innocently with wide eyes untainted by the sight of blood, eyes that would not stay so very naive for long.

He laughed and ruffled my hair, "One day you shall wield a sword such as that, but for now, this is yours," He unwrapped a knife, with razor sharp edges and a leather hilt, I eyed it with awe, "You are quick, fast and small. You can get under their guard and slice them to bit's if you wished – and you will," he spoke down to me and I nodded, not understanding fully the true gravity of what he had said.

"Thank you," I smiled slyly, taking the blade in hand... feeling it's balanced weight on my finger. Running my fingers across the cool flat metal.

"There's no need to thank me, my little huntress," he said and walked away, leaving me there with the single object that would carve my future.

You see, I may have been his daughter but that was not how I was treated. My family, acted as if I were their weapon – the savage little pet they kept at arm's length. Never once did I hear them utter the words 'I love you' or display any affection towards me, but I never seemed to realise it. I was content with being their little hunter, nothing more and nothing less.

I remember the day I discovered death. As I watched with innocent eyes, my cousin Seth, slaughter a boy twice his weight and height on the television screen. I witnessed the grandness, the glory and the honour that my cousin was bestowed with, when he returned home a victor of the Games. I saw him swimming in riches.

What I did not see was the scaring... how he woke screaming from those same memories of blood and bone. The sadness so carefully hidden in his eyes. The ones he drowned in alcohol and tears. No, I did not see this broken soul.

And so the older I became, the I more detached I grew from my family and attached I became to my training; I wanted to be a victor about as much as I needed to breathe and I knew I was good enough to do so. On my thirteenth birthday, my father sat me down.

"Now Clove," he started, speaking more like a coach than a parent, "I think it's time you focused more on your sword and spear skills, then those silly useless knives," he laughed and I scowled.

"Knives are as deadly as any other weapon!" I spat and he sighed condescending; the same way any parent did when a toddler threw a tantrum.

"They are for children," he protested.

"Then consider me a child. A _very deadly_ child," I seethed, stroking the hilt of a blade hidden in my boot.

Then I walked away.

My heart didn't feel remorse after the fight, it was cold. Stone cold. If I wished, I could try and blame this on my parents and how they never showed any love towards me, so I never learned emotion, but deep down I would know it wasn't true. I was born like this, a silent killer. One who didn't feel or empathise.

The world was the enemy, and then there was me.

Determined to prove him utterly wrong, I threw myself wholeheartedly into training, but I was to blind to see all the friends I lost in the process, they kids I used to hang around with in school drifted away, they almost seemed frightened by me, which was easily understandable, but even then I was never lonely – not when I had my lovely little knives to stab and cut and slice the enemy. These blades were my friends, my companions.

And so, little by little, I became a monster.

Remembering the first moment when I caught myself grinning to a girl on the screen with similar stature to myself sending an arrow through the heart of another child. The horror in that child's eyes, the shock, it gave me chills. Soon I found myself laughing. How silly they thought they could escape, how pitiful.

Yes, I was a monster, empathy a foreign concept and compassion an unknown theory I didn't see the need to test.

The truly tragic part was that I was okay with being empty, because I didn't notice myself drifting off in the first place. My innocence had almost entirely frayed away, leaving a girl with a twisted outlook on the world. One who's eyes relished in the blood of the innocent.

And I still believed I was perfectly fine. Perfectly sane.

So when I volunteered and stepped up on that platform, head held high and voice ringing so very proud with the whole of my district there to watch, I had one thought in my mind;

_There was new blood for my knife to taste._

And that's when the last scrap of innocence left my heart, fraying away in the wind like a fallen autumn leaf.

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**Hope you liked it, and if you review I shall give you a virtual Mexican-Walking-Fish!**


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